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It's your phone, do what you want with it. Funny that in the weeks leading up I saw so much love for Sync and the instant it dropped there was a massive shift. Maybe because of the Play Store privacy section? Lemmy is every bit as vulnerable to bandwagoning as Reddit. In a week nobody will be talking about it.
The shift was from:
- Only way to remove ads at launch was the ultra subscription ($2/mo or $17/yr)
- Once a one-time payment for ad removal (not ultra) was added, it cost $20 which is higher than people were expecting. It started out cheaper and rose once or twice throughout the day.
- The one-time payment for "ultra" as added late in the day and costs $99 (the Sync for Reddit version was $30)
I'm personally torn because I really like Sync and I believe the dev should be paid for their work. IMO Sync is far and away the best app for Lemmy at the moment, and it very likely always will be.
The problem is $99 for an app is very steep. If that's the price that makes it worth the dev effort and lower userbase, so be it, but that doesn't make it any less expensive.
There are lots of FOSS lemmy apps out there with dedicated developers that are ad and tracker free (shoutout to Connect). They aren't as polished as Sync. However, almost all of them have only been around for a month and have seen an astonishing amount of improvements in that time. Who's to say they won't eventually match/beat Sync?
Speaking for myself, it feels weird to be forking $99 over to Sync for porting their app over from Reddit when I've never donated to any instances, any other 3rd-party lemmy apps, or to lemmy development itself. I'll probably donate to those things eventually, but paying $99 for Sync before giving money to those other parts of the lemmy ecosystem just feels out of order.
I'm holding out to see if the one time payment for Ultra drops in price. In the meantime, my adblocker (dns66) makes it so I don't see any ads anyway.
It's not $99 for the app though, it's $20 for sync ad-free, which is reasonable for a crazy polished app like this one. The $99 gets you a tiny bit more functionality they provide extra based around a subscription model because recurring revenue makes sure you always have the funds to further your project. I don't necessarily agree with this sentiment, but I also don't need any of those extra features.
Also, sync is just the beginning. Many more apps will follow. If they still think that price is reasonable, then so be it. But $20 is very fair IMO.
As someone who has never used Sync, what are the features in Ultra to justify a 5x increase in price?
It doesn't justify it IMO, but the features are not the point. It's about supporting the development for a (currently) smaller userbase.
On Reddit, Sync Ultra was able to restore deleted comments and translate posts/comments in app.
I hate subscriptions as much as the next one, but I have never used Reddit, only Sync, and it is such a polished app, so I'm paying 3$ a month to keep ljdawson developing it to be even better.
So the money also goes towards keeping the developer interested and invested in his app.
I know plenty of free alternatives exists, and as of now you aren't getting anything for your money that you couldn't get elsewhere for free, but as of now I am loving having sync back.
